Sara and Gerald Murphy, according to one contemporary, “had invented summer on the Riviera,” a remark that would have made them cringe. But for the American expatriate literary set in the 1920s, the Murphys weren’t just the life of the party; they were the party. Their ongoing celebration at Villa America, their splendid house at Cap d’Antibes, was a coveted invitation and, later, itself a literary subject. F. Scott Fitzgerald dedicated Tender Is the Night to Sara and Gerald (and thought, mistakenly, he’d written their characters); Ernest Hemingway wrote them into The Garden of Eden, a novel published posthumously; and Archibald MacLeish modeled the main characters of J.B., his verse-drama retelling of the Book of Job, after the Murphys.

That last reference tells you that Sara and Gerald suffered great tragedy, a metaphor for the golden years that came to a thudding end. But, as Villa America points out, their story mirrored the time in other ways. The beauty they revealed in the everyday, the ideas and discussions they encouraged, and their generosity toward their guests stimulated both passion and excess, the triumph and ugliness of the Twenties.

Klaussmann bends her considerable talent toward this ambitious subject. She re-creates the setting, the ambience, the devil-may-care, the rivalries, and the outsize personalities, drawing Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and Hemingway with particular zest and color. My favorite part of the book, though, was the story of Sara’s and Gerald’s furtive courtship, and how these two lonely people who knew they were different from their horrible families managed to find one another and overcome parental objections to marry. That section reads like the music of isolation, yearning for connection, and the joy and relief at finding it.

In fact, music plays a role. There’s a splendid scene where Sara and her family attend the London premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which had caused such a scandal in Paris. The ballet makes her realize what it is she’s been missing, what she wants:

She wanted to be down on the stage with the dancers, feel her rib cage meet the planks, feel the sickly ache of having her breath knocked out. She was reminded of the first time she’d tasted blood in her mouth (a skating accident), the surprise that it tasted good, rich, tangy on her tongue, the even more startling revelation that she wanted to taste it again.

Naturally, no one else in Sara’s family understands the ballet or what it was trying to say. But she senses that Gerald would have, and from that moment, she feels less alone.

For me, however, the rest of Villa America went downhill, and I found myself plodding through. From the moment the Murphys settle in on the Riviera, each chapter, which covers a particular year, feels like an episode. Many have tension, some are entertaining, but they seem to go around in circles. There are parties at which the Fitzgeralds behave like spoiled children, enraging everyone. Hemingway, a charismatic lout, repays the Murphys’ generous hospitality by treating Gerald with contempt and trying to seduce Sara. And the cycle repeats.

I like stargazing, to a point. But there has to be a unifying thread, or the narrative never gets beyond that, and the one Klaussmann chose doesn’t work for me. Gerald has doubts about his sexual orientation, and though how he deals with this stunts him, his struggle remains largely isolated. I wish I could say more without giving away too much, but I wanted a confrontation, a reckoning, and there wasn’t one, something of an anticlimax.

As a result, Villa America remains for me a series of social situations that contain both beauty and ugliness, sometimes side by side. That’s life, it’s accurate, but it’s not a novel. The joy in the beginning and the tragedy at the end (unfortunately revealed in a prologue; why?) seem like two towers with no connecting wall. There’s a lot of dancing and drinking and back-stabbing taking place between them, but for me, that wasn’t enough.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Review: West of Sunset, by Stewart O’Nan
Penguin, 2015. 289 pp. $28.
I’ve never been able to read about addictions. I have thin tolerance for masochism, an issue that cuts to the bone with me, without having to find it in the bottle, the racetrack, or various crystalline powders. I have zero tolerance for addicts who beat up their spouses, friends, or anyone else, let alone themselves, so presenting them as sympathetic fictional characters is a tough sell. Recently, I put aside The Temporary Gentleman (nominated for the Sir Walter Scott Prize), by the splendid writer Sebastian Barry, because I couldn’t imagine how anyone would waste time on the protagonist, a violent, irresponsible drunk.

However, West of Sunset calls my bluff. It’s about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last years, spent in Hollywood, where he tries to pay back his debts, stay ahead of his crippling expenses, and restore his self-respect. Even if you don’t know the story, you can guess that Hollywood is the last place to find redemption, especially for a writer who considers himself an artist. Double that if said writer destroys himself with pills washed down with alcohol.

A familiar story this is. Yet I can’t resist Fitzgerald, whom I put above any American writer of his generation. For depth, for psychological acuity, for prose–which, at its effortless best, feels like breathing–I think he has no equal from that prolific era in American letters. But it’s not that West of Sunset is a fan letter; anything but. True, O’Nan has captured Scott’s perceptions, ways of thought, and voice, and at times you can sense Amory Blaine or Nick Carraway or Dick Diver lurking just beyond the pages. But the literary frisson is only an overlay to the pain beneath, of a man who had talent to burn and, sadly, did just that with it. Where Scott once thought himself on top of the world, destined for immortality, “so much of his life now was making arrangements, and he’d never been any good at it.” Hollywood, though he doesn’t know it, is his last, valiant try:

. . . the dream L.A. sold, like any Shangri-La, was one not of surpassing achievement but unlimited ease, a state attainable by only the very rich and the dead. Half beach, half desert, the place was never meant to be habitable. . . .On the streets there was a weariness that seemed even more pronounced at night, visible through the yellow windows of burger joints and drugstores about to close, leaving their few customers nowhere to go. Inconceivably, he was one of that rootless tribe now, doomed to wander the boulevards, and again he marveled at his own fall, and at his capacity for appreciating it.

Fitzgerald’s contradictions are all in this novel. He’s a frat-boy libertine and Puritan; selfish and open-handed; roils with anger, yet tries to make peace (while sober, anyway); yearns for acceptance while believing it’s his right; and wants desperately to do the right thing, even as he surrenders to his worst nature. But West of Sunset is hardly a one-man show. O’Nan gives full life to Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda, Scottie, their teenage daughter, and to Sheilah Graham, the gossip columnist with whom Fitzgerald falls in love. Through them, as well as Scott, the narrative holds astonishing tension, despite the cycle of gin and repentance, and the inevitable end.

Another pleasure is the Hollywood scene. Bogart gets a good bit of ink, and Marlene Dietrich, Ernest Hemingway, and Joan Crawford, among others, make noteworthy appearances. The gossipy studio repartee is delicious, as when Dorothy Parker remarks, of Crawford, “She’s slept with everyone at Metro except Lassie.” Charles MacArthur, in town with his actress wife, Helen Hayes, “was over at Universal adapting his last play, a task Scott imagined was like slowly poisoning your own child.”

West of Sunset is a tragic, powerful tale about a man who said yes to all the wrong things because he had trouble saying no.